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It’s always nice when the postman brings you a care package from e-Raptor, but it’s especially cool when you get two of them! The first was the new set of inserts and organisers for the recently reprinted Revised 4th Edition of Talisman and the second is much the same, but with extra options for card storage!
I’ve spend a bit of time trying to fit in my collection of Talisman in various ways and you can see the results and some thoughts below. e-Raptor have made these inserts with using the original box for the game (along with the similar-sized boxes like The Cataclysm expansion), but they are also looking at a bespoke ‘case’ to hold all of the inserts when it’s been shown exactly what is needed.
The first package was made to house the base game of Talisman along with the first three ‘small’ expansions to be reprinted, namely The Reaper, The Frostmarch and The Lost Realms. They then added six of the newly-redesigned character organisers that e-Raptor are famous for! The new organiser is has a smaller footprint than the original which fits well into this new modular solution.
The second package contains the same trays as the first lot, but with an additional double card tray that replaces the character organisers. Further down the page you can see how these all fit together and how you would be able to swap and change various aspects of the storage to suit your own needs!
I’ll start by looking at the components in the order they are numbered by sheet and then ramble on a bit later on…
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The first sheet contains a triple token tray which is around 6 inches long and easily takes all of the cones for Strength, Craft and Life, and has been made to be used alongside the longer card tray from sheet two.
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The second sheet holds the 6 inch card tray, and together with the token tray above it takes up one of the two sizes of storage areas in the box.
We’ll call this the large area, which is the same area taken up by the character organisers and the newer double card tray.
As mentioned in my first look at these over on the Talisman Island Facebook page (link below), my ‘small’ cards which are unsleeved (for now!) can be divided into 2 groups of roughly 6 inches and 4 groups of around 5 inches in length.
Strangely the longer tray does not have slots for dividers which I’d have preferred, but I’ll come to that later. Oh, and the two dividers you can see in the pictures above are actually for the tray on the third sheet!
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The next sheet has a shorter 5 inch tray plus a couple of spaces for tokens and/or dice and takes up the smaller of the two sizes of storage areas, which is the same as the character card tray.
There is a central divider and 6 slots that have dividers that have an overhang. Unfortunately the overhang causes them to interfere somewhat with the space set aside for tokens, so the stubby dividers that come with the newer tray would probably be better here.
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From what I can work out, the character tray storage on this sheet is designed so that you can place a smaller amount of large cards (like those that would come in the base game and first 3 expansions) on top of the area below where you can store the playing pieces and perhaps some extra tokens.
For my purposes however, I have removed the inner walls so that I could use the entire tray for large cards as I have a large number of homebrew characters and alternative endings printed up for the game.
I also have all of my character playing pieces on display in a cabinet, so don’t require the extra space for those. I believe if you were to store a full set of miniatures in the box they would take up one of the larger areas, so you could use the space taken up by the character organisers if you wanted, or you could opt to use an additional box for these, perhaps the size of the new corner expansion boxes (to be confirmed!)
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To finish off the first package, you will have 6 character organisers like the one shown on the left above, which fit nicely into a larger area of the box.
They have slots and recesses for cones and gold coins only as the fate tokens need to be separate so they can be easily flipped from dark to light and vice versa. There are also areas that will take smaller cards, for alignment and spells etc if you wish.
One of the things I like about this range of trays, and most of the e-Raptor range, is that each tray slots together without the need for any glue as they have sprung joints which hold together really well. You can see what I mean in the second picture above.
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Instead of the character organisers, the second package comes with a 5 inch double card tray that has a small amount of additional storage at one side.
It comes with 12 ‘stubby’ dividers which are better than the ones in the single 5 inch card tray as they don’t encroach on the additional storage space. The number of slots has also been doubled up from the single tray which should be easy enough to replicate should e-Raptor wish.
There’s a tiny bit of storage at the side that can take oddments of tokens, or even a small amount of unsleeved small cards at a push. The choice is yours!
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As you can see above, both storage options fit nicely into the ‘standard’ Talisman game box, and you can swap the various trays around (within reason!) as you see fit. I’ve just used a similar loadout for simplicity.
One good thing about this modular solution is that you could probably make a storage box to house everything by making it 1.5 times wider and 2 times taller than a large box and it’d all fit in there as a large and small ‘section’ takes up half a box.
I shall list the various options I have gone with below so you can make up your own mind as to what you might need.
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As mentioned previously, the first storage solution will take the base game along with the first three ‘small’ expansions, but you can mix it up however you wish.
I’ve gone with (bottom to top) –
The bulk of my Adventure card stack with the cones for Strength, Craft and Life in the tray above. To the right are all of my Character cards, including a number of homebrew creations, mainly from Talisman: Digital Edition by Nomad Games. As mentioned above, I have removed the inner walls to accommodate these.
The bottom half of the other tray has the remainder of the Adventure cards, with the top section holding all of the Spell cards from the game. The small section to the right is holding the dice (8 of them plus an extra d12) and the Dragon Sleep tokens.
The right hand side holds the 6 character organisers, bottom to top/top to bottom, as the bolts that hold them together stand proud of the base.
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The second box holds everything else! Briefly (bottom to top) –
Corner region decks, with Fate and Fireland tokens along with gold coins in the token tray. The larger card tray holds all of the Alternative Ending cards along with various official and homebrew NPC cards etc.
You’ll also note that I’ve used a resin tray from Play Tray UK to hold the various Character tokens from The Woodland expansion, but I’d prefer maybe some shallower trays with dividers to maybe sit in the top of that tray. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but it’d be nice!
I believe on the top left we have the three Dragon decks along with the Harbinger deck and Remnant cards next to some homebrew tokens for the digital Lost Lands ending.
The tray on the right has what’s left! You’ll note that I’ve used acrylic dividers here, but vertically as that is how I used to store my cards. I have look into getting a set of horizontal dividers made up and will switch to those when I have done so.
I tend not to use the regular dividers as I find that they don’t often match up with the sizes of the decks very well and you end up with a fair bit of wasted space.
As you can see there really isn’t a huge amount of room to the left of the new tray, but you can fit a few bits and pieces in like the Crown token and some life counters from Magic the Gathering!
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…and of course, there’s no getting away from the fact that Talisman has A LOT of boards and rule books that need to be stored somewhere. As you will know they do take up a full box if stored together, so for a single solution that has to be taken into account.
I will note however that the two boxes with trays above would take a base game or Cataclysm board above the trays along with a rule book, so perhaps it’s not as difficult as I’m making out!
So, in conclusion…
I really like this idea from e-Raptor, as it utilises the original boxes for the game, but then the trays can also be used in a larger purpose-built box if necessary depending on what is in your collection. The trays can also be removed from the box and used at the table, so there’s no need to set up things separately
As it stands now, I would be happy to use this in 3 boxes, as I don’t need to store my minis. However, I’d like a little more space to add some more homebrew cards to the collection in future, so we shall see what comes next.
You’d also have to take the extra space required into consideration if you use sleeves on your cards, though I’d need to research exactly how much more would be needed (unless someone can let me know just how much room a sleeved deck takes up – hint hint!)
The thing with using the original boxes is that for the reprint (unless you are in Poland… don’t ask!) the ‘corner’ boxes will now be the smaller size (like The Woodland) so if you only have the reprint, the only ‘large’ boxes available to you will be the base game of Talisman, The Dragon and The Cataclysm expansions (29.5cm x 29.5cm x 7cm).
The Dungeon, The Highland, The City and The Woodland expansions will have the ‘medium’ boxes (25.3cm x 25.3cm x 5cm), with everything else being in a ‘small’ box (19.4cm x 13cm x 3.5cm).
I’ll add to this article when I’ve had a bit more time to ponder the options, and chatted to the elves over at e-Raptor and hopefully we’ll be able to come up with the optimum storage for Talisman, no matter what your loadout is like!
More soon!
First look on Talisman Island’s Facebook page